The Guardian's editorial today begins with a long evisceration of Keir Starmer and his caution, before noting:
Andy Burnham, sketching a different course. His “Manchesterism” sees national control of the essentials: housing, energy, transport, water. He wants prices regulated via public coordination to keep costs low. He says long-term borrowing should be used to build the social stock. He is unafraid to float another £40bn for social housing, or to dismiss “bond vigilantes” as arbiters of affordability. On the continent this is normal politics. In Britain it marks a bracing break with the post-1980s consensus.
The irony is that Sir Keir once campaigned on a similar programme: public ownership, higher taxes for the wealthy and a Green New Deal. One by one those promises were abandoned as high office came into view. What remains is cautious orthodoxy. Mr Burnham is offering Labour members what Sir Keir once promised, before discarding it. That is, no doubt, why “Manchesterism” appeals to members and unsettles Downing Street. It is not nostalgia for municipal socialism, but closer to European models of interventionist capitalism: taming costs directly, rather than waiting for markets to deliver. The contrast is stark. Sir Keir sells continuity. Mr Burnham's ideas offer rupture. The question for Labour conference is which future the party wants.
This, I stress, is an editorial, and not an op-ed. The paper appears to have moved against Labour, or at least Starmer.
Let me put this in the context of the piece I have published this morning on Plate, the cave and the Overton window.
What The Guardian is saying is that Starmer is determined to play in the shadows of archetypal neoliberal thinking projected on the back of the cave that the media has constructed for us. Burnham, in contrast, wants to at least turn towards the light and the big, wide world that we have to address.
It's not hard to decide in that case, is it?
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In short the British people need to engage with the reality they can’t separate morality from money and markets, the three M’s!
Agreed.
Burnham as a mayor seems to get out and walk about.
He seems to know about investment – investing to save.
I’ve seen invest to save in local authorities who have been under severe pressure with money. It works if it is managed properly.
The things is, learning how to articulate ‘invest to save’ to voters who are more like Pavlov’s dogs in their reaction to constant cost cutting to the point where it becomes an argument between whose needs get cut and nothing else as they are encouraged to fight each other and not the crappy politicians who preside over it.
At least it sounds like Burnham understands that neoliberalism is destroying the lives of people by the insecurity it creates around the basic needs of life. Starmer doesn’t get that. Whether it is rent going up by 10% a year, water bills of 26% on average, or pensioners being told to wrap up warm for Christmas, it simply is not sustainable. Next we will get Reform and the Poor House.
So, the choice for Labour is more of the same with Starmer, and lose power fairly soon, or someone else who recognises where the fault lines in the system really are.
One has a vision, and it’s not Starmer.
Good to see The Guardian acknowledge that what the UK sees as radical left policies – like Corbyn’s – are none other than mainstream consensus in most of Western Europe. It was amazing – looking at it from here in France – how the UK media portrayed Corbyn, while at the same time here in France the centre-left leader, Benoît Hamon – not, note, radical left or green, but centre-left – was campaigning for universal basic income and legalising cannabis – and Burnham’s prescriptions – nationalisation, price regulation, rent controls, more social housing, etc – were already just the status-quo. As indeed they were in the UK before Thatcher.
And the hand-picked chief Praetorian Guards of the neoliberal cave are the PPE Oxbots: Nigel Lawson, Blair, Osborne, Hunt, Sunak, Reeves etc because their job is to impose an eternal perma-frost of neoliberal austerity.
(Small point but if we were all to prefix ‘austerity’ with neoliberal to form ‘neoliberal austerity’ might this be more accurate, might it take people a bit closer to stepping outside Plato’s shadow cave., since austerity is the commonly used pseudonym for neoliberal oppression?)
Name it, to tame it. It’s a proven change process in human process. Use it all the time. Name the huge elephant in the room.
Noted
The dark forces you allude to in your “Silencing dissent….” piece will be coming after Mr Burnham.
Very much true. If you’re a democratic socialist then the choice is not hard at all.
Starmer is an initiativist. There’s no underpinning theory of what good government looks like or who it should serve but every now and then he sees a problem that can be solved by a bright idea. And he’ll announce an initiative. A new fuel payment, 1 in 1 out. Digital ID. Oh ‘struth, not another initiative, was the refrain from some people who knew him as Prosecutor General.
Andy Burnham – the idiotic loudmouth who didn’t give a damn about spreading Covid from his patch to Scotland in 2021 when people were dying from Covid in their thousands. Apparently, being Mayor of Manchester gives him responsibility for strategic governance in, inter alia, health!
From the BBC website, Manchester area, 20 June 2021:
The Scottish Government announced “that non-essential travel between Scotland and Manchester and Salford would be banned from Monday.
Mr Burnham said the decision was “announced out of the blue” and was “completely disproportionate”. The Scottish government said it was made after “careful consideration”.
A spokesman said Scottish rules on travel were “kept under active review” and could “sometimes happen at short notice” after receiving the latest data. He added Covid rates in Manchester and Salford were “particularly high at the moment and these restrictions are intended to minimise the risk of either exacerbating the situation there or indeed allowing more virus to come back here to Scotland”.
Maybe he’s matured and developed some nous since 2021 but his behaviour then is memorable for it’s nastiness in his attempt to undermine carefully considered steps to protect people from a rampant and dangerous virus. (He was on TV a lot at the time whining about travel restrictions; it’s very hard not to see it as political posturing).
He’s also mouthed off about Scottish independence. How very English of him to assume that he has any say in Scotland’s future whatsoever.
On the constitutional issue Burnham said: “I never want to see a border across the top of the north of England and Scotland in my lifetime.” I’ve got news for the Mayor of Manchester – there’s already a border between Scotland and England because it’s two separate countries.
It’s hard to see this guy turning “towards the light” – rather he’s just another colonial master, the latest in a long line of them and, quite frankly, a bit of a bozo.